1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user interfaces applied to electronic devices, and more particularly to a vision-based user interface and related method that take hand gestures as input.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Naturalness and ease of use are two main objectives in research of human-computer interaction (HCI). For a long time, in interacting with electronic devices such as television sets, computers, cameras, and mobile phones, people have had to use special input devices, such as keyboards, buttons, touch screens, and remote controllers. Although people have become used to these input devices, some inherent drawbacks exist. For example, with the increased popularity of handheld devices, and the decrease in size of such devices, keyboards and buttons are hard to integrate as input devices, or become so small that a user struggles to activate his/her intended button.
Direct use of the hand as an input device is an attractive method for providing natural human-computer interaction. Some existing techniques use electro-mechanical or magnetic sensing devices, such as data gloves, to acquire hand gestures. However, the use of such sensors increases both cost and inconvenience.